 | A WRITER'S WIT |
New Yorker Fiction 2016
John Gall March 14, 2016, Ann Beattie, “For the Best”: Gerald, a seventy-nine-year-old former model (among other things), attends an early December party in Manhattan, where he knows in advance that his ex-wife may appear. ¶ And she does. Jumping out from behind the Christmas tree in the lobby, she materializes, terribly inebriated, right as Gerald is leaving the building where the party has been held. They stroll up the street to gaze at the newly lit tree at Rockefeller Center, she verbally jabs him a few times, and he puts her in a cab. One finds it difficult to know what this 7,000 word story is about. Beattie references the terrorist attacks in Paris (November 13, 2015) and in San Bernardino (December 2, 2015), more as set design, perhaps, than as authentic threads of the narrative. She goes to great pains to replicate the dialects/manners of three discrete generations. However, the story seems to whiz by as if you’re aboard one of those moving sidewalks at an airport, without really establishing an arc. Why is the couple’s adult son, who lives in Seattle, mentioned at all, except as the couple's mutual failure? Why the name dropping?
“To his great surprise, he found out that Charlotte and Willers had a psychiatrist in common, a Dr. Frederick Owls, known as the Owl, on Central Park West.”
Please. Are we still referencing Gatsby (even subliminally), not to mention Hillary Clinton, Yale, and Woody Allen? The climax may well be more of a punch line, which appears in the last three sentences of the story:
“But she’d been delighted that he was rich. It was one of the reasons she’d married him. He shook his head over the illogic of that, unaware that he was doing it until he caught sight of his reflection in the mirrored wall of the elevator, and it was as he’d thought: he’d grown old.”
Must Beattie make Gerald’s difficulty with aging that explicit? We’ve known it since the first paragraph. Her collection, “The State We’re In: Maine Stories,” came out in 2015.
Illustration by John Gall
Illustration by John Gall
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Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
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"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
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"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
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"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
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"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.
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